Dark love poem to America

“In 1968, legendary badass Johnny Cash reportedly visited Nickajack Cave in his native Tennessee, with the intention of killing himself. Instead, he had something of a spiritual experience in that cave, and emerged ready to quit using drugs (which he did, temporarily). This macabre personal narrative is visually represented in a new music video for the once and always Man In Black, one which begins by taking viewers right into the maw of that cave, and ends with our exit.”

This video is filled with hauntingly beautiful and brooding imagery – staged as that classic roadtrip right through the dark American underbelly. There are no shortages of images of prisons, tatoo’s and black crows flying about all seen from the perspective of an anonymous driver in a very big Cadillac.

There is a very strong sense of a biblical narrative here – as always with Johnny Cash – stemming from his White Trash -Tennessee background.

Think like a publisher

I’m super excited to let You all know that our first, very own app is now available in the App Store on iTunes. Normally I’m not soliciting downloads and ratings but in this case I’ll make an exception – If You like what You see please go to…

…and download the app for free and give us a rating in the store (this will help us tremendously)

The app was build from scratch – with my bare hands – using Adobe tools such as InDesign PublishingSuite and so on… I could never have done this without being a subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud which has opened up completely new playgrounds for me.

Much has been said – and is still being said – about think like a publisher and this project is my take on it. I believe that the new technologies and new-media has given each and everyone of us a golden opportunity to craft and distribute our own story.

Salman Rushdie sleeps in 3D

Salman Rushdie sleeps in 3D – A brilliant 3D piece by Mounir Fatmi depicting Salman Rushdi sleeping for 6 hours echoing Andy Warhol’s famous “Sleep”
Rife with conflicting emotions such as violence, death and gentle peace I cannot get the image of the enbalmed Lenin out of my head.

The full six-hour-long video was ironically censored at a show at l’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris last year, but will premiere this week at Paradise Row as part of his solo exhibition History is Not Mine. “Rushdie lives between different worlds, between countries, between life and death,” says Fatmi. “It is at once boring and voyeuristic to look at someone sleeping for six hours. I want the audience to feel guilty about Rushdie’s destiny.”

The scene is illuminated by a soft and classical light which just increases the timelessness of this piece. The film moves on and transcends into digital sculpture.

The One Channel launch brings a well needed facelift to Your channel, with a large image on top of the page that brings a more modern and visual look to the page. You can now also organize Your material better with possibilities to feature videos based on tags, popularity, time of upload and so on.

“Take greater control over how you present your videos and playlists on your channel. You can now curate content — your own or others’ — into highly visible sections for your fans to discover what to watch. With multiple layouts for videos and playlists, you can arrange your channel to best highlight your content.”

When a non-subscriber chances upon Your channel You have the option of upload a tease video that ideally will tell them more about Your channel and pull them in.

But the biggest news is undoubtely the fact that the page is now optimized to look good on any device, desktop, mobile, tablet and even TV (is that the upcoming Google TV?)

“People watch your channel everywhere, on their couches, at their desks, on the bus. You need to look your best on all kinds of screens. Now your channel art will scale beautifully to any size screen, and your social and merchandise links will be available on any device with a browser.”

Hahnemuhle Paper Fashion

Fashion designer Michael Sontag doesn’t sketch, draw or otherwise put his ideas down on paper before getting to work on his designs. Instead he intuitively and very much hands-on starts draping the fabric directly on his model – like a sculptor working with steel, glass or stone.

It’s his hands that are doing the work, directly manipulating the raw materials. The shapes are born directly from underneath his hands moving over a body and it’s this approach that leads to the fluidity, intimacy and movement of his pieces.
In this collaborative project Hahnemühle Fine Art Paper serves as his raw material. Folding, draping, moulding and ripping the paper he is creating instant and very short lived designs that only live long enough to be recorded on a computer chip in a camera.
It’s a very poetic mix of fashion, performance and semi-scientific research.

DIGITAL – WORK, PROCESS & IMAGINATIONThis performance and dance-like piece is documented and digitalized by fashion photographer Per Zennstrom. Even though the resulting sculptural shapes are physical objects consisting of real paper they will only live for an instant, barely enough to be recorded and preserved in digital form before they are gone.
The digital output of Michael Sontags work is then presented on stage at Photokina, in theform of a fashion photo-shooting/performance which in many ways is a digital “reflection” and re-enactment of the first analogue session.

PAPER – THE END
As the process and performance nears the end the resulting images are again migrating back to the original media – paper. Large format prints from the photo shooting will be printed out on printers in plain view of the visitors…